


Feels Like Home

by Triss_Hawkeye



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Anger, Blade of Marmora Keith (Voltron), Cooking, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27113380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triss_Hawkeye/pseuds/Triss_Hawkeye
Summary: During his time with the Blade of Marmora, Keith plays truant for an evening.Fic is unfinished and abandoned.
Relationships: Hunk & Keith (Voltron)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	Feels Like Home

**Author's Note:**

> Written September 2018. Set nebulously in season 4/5, pre-Bloodlines, when Keith is away with the Blade of Marmora.

It wasn’t planned.

“Is that–” Keith had caught himself and feigned a look of nothing more than mild interest when the Castle of Lions came up on their scanner, in orbit around another planet in the same star system that the Blade of Marmora’s ship was currently located in. Voltron’s target was probably the Galra factory on the surface of the inner planet, whereas his group of Blades were currently staking out a comms outpost on the outer planet. He’d been vaguely aware that both parties had business in this system, although he’d assumed that Voltron would have moved in long after the Blade had been and gone. Their schedules overlapping was an extraordinary coincidence.

He noticed Kolivan give him a sideways glance and trained his face into neutrality. “Are we going to hail them, sir?” he asked, his voice cool and controlled, though it took all his effort to remain so.

“No,” Kolivan replied flatly. “We currently have nothing new to report to them, and outgoing transmissions risk giving our position away. Go get some sleep. We’ll make our move in five vargas.”

A flash of anger was followed by a swell of injustice, and Keith swallowed them both back down inside him, closing his eyes and pursing his lips. He took a breath to steady himself, then nodded his assent and left the bridge without a word. In the corridor outside, he looked down at his hands. White half-moons were etched into his palms from clenching them. He flung an arm out to the side, pain jolting through his knuckles as they impacted the wall. He let out a hot, fast huff of breath and stalked off towards his room. 

A few steps and steady breaths later quietened the roaring in his head and returned him to an even keel. He rerouted his steps towards the airlock. Their current ship wasn’t large, but it did contain some personal-sized crafts for surface-to-orbit or interplanetary hops. They were small, stealthy things, their weirdly-shaped black forms putting him in mind of some sort of high-tech bat. Mainly they’d been using them to get in closer to the comms outpost undetected. That stealth would prove handy now. Trusting that Kolivan would assume him gone to sleep for at least a couple of hours, Keith stole out of the ship as quietly as possible, and sent his craft into the heart of the star system. 

It was still wild to think about, being able to travel in the space of minutes what humanity had only recently figured out how to do in months. The speck of light that was the inner planet glowed brighter, then swelled to fill his screen, and the Castle of Lions in orbit subsequently did the same as he decelerated to match its speed and pull up alongside. He wasn’t expected, but he was familiar enough with the ship to know how to get into it. Cat-like, he padded silently through the corridors, wondering if they had always been this huge and empty. It was eerily quiet, until he approached the kitchen and heard with relief the sound of a familiar voice.

Keith leant in the doorway, still figuring out how to announce his presence as he watched Hunk clatter about, muttering to himself in Samoan and mixing something together in a bowl. Keith couldn’t help but smile at the sight. He leaned forward to step into the room, and as he did so, Hunk looked up at him, stumbled back in surprise, and with an undignified yelp, dropped the bowl onto the floor.

“Wha- Keith?! Geez, you scared me!” He made a motion to try to pick up the mess but couldn’t quite bring himself to stop staring at Keith in disbelief. Keith walked up and picked the bowl up for him. It had somehow managed to land right way up, and some of the remains of something green and stringy had miraculously—or possibly unfortunately—stayed intact inside the bowl. 

“Yeah, it’s me,” he said. “Hi. What’s this?”

“Uh, hi! Well,” Hunk replied, mopping up the stuff that had landed on the floor, “Uh. D’you wanna try some space salad?”

“Space salad?” Keith said dubiously, scrutinising the contents of the bowl. Ah, what the hell, Hunk was a good cook. He reached for a spoon sitting on the side. “Sure, I’ll try it.”

Hunk raised his eyebrows and watched as Keith attempted to manoeuvre some of the green onto a spoon. “Yeah, so Shiro and Allura had a, uh, cultural misunderstanding about what salad actually is the other day, so I thought I’d try and whip one up before the others get back—they’re just finishing something off, I said I’d make food. I’ve been building up our supplies, but it turns out there’s very little on board that actually behaves like, y’know, a leaf.” Keith nodded as he took a mouthful. As a testament to Hunk’s skills, it didn’t taste half bad—it had a surprisingly rich, peppery flavour, like some sort of combination of butter and arugula. It also slid down his throat in a manner reminiscent of chewed celery. 

“Well, it _tastes_ all right…” Keith trailed off, unable to come up with a tactful end to the sentence.

“Yeah, that was the conclusion I was coming to,” Hunk said wryly, taking the bowl back and tossing it back onto the counter. “Think I’ll shelve that project for now. But hey, since you’re here—like, surprise! You didn’t even call us! You know what? I’ll make cookies. Now that I can do.”

“You made some improvements since the scaultrite incident?”

“You bet! I even found these blue things that are not chocolate chips, but will absolutely do as a substitute. Wanna help out?”

“Sure.” Keith joined Hunk at the counter and took out some sort of weighing scale from one of the cupboards as Hunk started digging out ingredients. “So… what’s been happening with you guys while I’ve been gone?”

“Hah, well, so we just spent the past week on this planet where for four days we thought the inhabitants only spoke in… well I’d say gesture but it was more like interpretive dance really—can you weigh out a gantile of this stuff please?—only then we found out that they did have a spoken language all along, it was just too high pitched for humans and Alteans to hear—yeah it’s that squiggly symbol there, don’t worry about getting it exact—we discovered this when Allura shapeshifted into one to try and make the dancing easier—thanks—and then Pidge whipped up a modulator and everyone spent the rest of the time being really still and polite, and it was sooooo awkward…”

Keith felt a smile creep across his face at Hunk’s chatter, even as the feeling crept up on him that something wasn’t right. Hunk trailed off, kept his eyes on his work, hunched in on himself and taking up weirdly little space. Like he didn’t want to get too close. Keith’s smile wavered. 

“Hey, you know…” he began. “I could just go.” The words sounded overly harsh out of his mouth and he kicked himself internally. “You know, if it’s better if I’m not around.”

Hunk stopped what he was doing and stared at him in outright dismay. “No! It’s not—I’m being weird. I’m being weird, aren’t I?”

Keith paused just a little too long to come out with a convincingly nice reply.

**Author's Note:**

> Unfortunately, that's pretty much it for the fic - I didn't actually keep any further notes on this one. I was very happy to see that season 7 had its own Keith & Hunk friendship arc though!
> 
> The gist for the remainder of the fic was that the rest of Team Voltron would arrive back and fuss over Keith being there, with Keith feeling weirdly detached from it all and worried he's made a big mistake and he doesn't fit in any more. There would be some awkwardness, some navigating feelings, some reassuring, and would have culminated in this line from Keith: "I know I’m doing the right thing for me, right now. But knowing you’re all here, that I'd be welcome back, someday... It means a lot. Thank you." And he sneaks back to the Blade feeling a bit better about everything, and Kolivan pretends to be entirely clueless that it happened. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Feel free to ask about this fic or my process, but the likelihood of me finishing this one is minimal.


End file.
